The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller (Vintage Contemporaries)

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri's new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Tom's chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. Soon Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, as they both reckon with the contours and mysteries of marriage: one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun. With precision and a rich vitality, Sue Miller—beloved and bestselling author of While I Was Gone—brings us a highly charged, superlative novel about marriage and forgiveness.

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

The New York Times

Miller describes her thinking, after Tom’s stroke: “now to have this unexpected, almost last-minute gift, this unlooked-for return to her of all that she had loved most  it was almost too much.”
Though both Tom and Nathan are as paper-thin as most of the men in the author’s fiction  Tom i...

BC Books

Neither Tyler nor Miller talk down to women or trivialize either their lives or their domestic concerns, and both writers go straight to the core of women’s hearts and minds — which is why both have such loyal and devoted followings among intelligent readers.

NPR

It's January, the stock market is shaky, and the Hollywood writer's strike is still dragging on, but Fresh Air's book critic says there's at least one piece of good news this month: Sue Miller has a new novel out.

Book Reporter

Meri is somewhat mollified when she meets the senator's wife, Delia, an elderly yet vibrant woman who welcomes Meri into her home and shows Meri around the city while still keeping Meri at an arm's distance.

Entertainment Weekly

(Miller describes Meri as ''an attractive version of Pete Rose,'' a truly strange image that makes it a bit too easy to understand Meri's concerns.) Their son, Asa, is born the same month that Tom suffers a crippling stroke, which means the helpless, word-slurring senator moves into Delia's house...

USA Today

This polished, witty, often opaque older woman fascinates Meri, whose bitter mother would tell her children she wished they'd never been born.Because Delia spends several months annually at her apartment in Paris, Meri is able to thoroughly indulge her fixation when Delia asks her to keep an eye ...

About.com Bestsellers

The Senator's Wife is an enjoyable read.ProsMiller creates complex, believable charactersThough not an inherently suspenseful story, Miller keeps you wanting moreThe ending pulls the novel together and makes an impactConsThe characters are not always likableDescriptionPublisher: KnopfPublished: J...